Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day
You fritter and waste the hours in an off-hand way
Kicking around on a piece of ground in your home town
Waiting for someone or something to show you the way
Tired of lying in the sunshine, staying home to watch the rain
And you are young and life is long, and there is time to kill today
And then one day you find ten years have got behind you
No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun
As one of those that carried that feeling throughout my life. It’s not that I haven’t worked to make things better. I’ve worked my ass off and all I’ve been able to achieve is barely treading water. I can’t invest in my community because I don’t have any spare resources to do so. I’m almost 40 and I’m still renting a room out of someone’s basement ffs and there’s no indication that anything is going to get better any time soon. If I wasn’t on the hook to act as a (shitty) safety net for my brother’s family when our parents are gone I’d have probably domed myself by now.
I’m middle-aged and with a good career in the tech sector and I’m in very nearly the same situation.
Community is what you make, sometimes it’s no more complicated than talking to the same people every evening when you take a walk or getting to know your neighbor. Your brother’s family is your community. Your family is your community.
I will repeat what I said in another post here, in one of my own darkest periods after literally losing everything and almost everyone in my life, I wrote myself a note I keep in a box labeled “open in case of emergency:”
I mean, great, I have family and some good friends too, but none of us have anything to spare and we’re all struggling to hold our shit together constantly. We get together and hang out a lot but we’re not able to actually fulfill any of our goals or grow as people. I want to do more with my life than just fucking consume bullshit and worry about if I’m going to have enough money to handle the next emergency.